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About this blog

Random things that occur to me

Entries in this blog

Applejack Eternal

Okay, before I get into the actual topic, I feel the need to address something: Cider and Alcohol Applejack in and of itself is an alcoholic drink. It’s made by taking already alcoholic cider and ‘freeze distilling’ it. Barely freezing it and fishing out the ice. Since alcohol freezes at a much lower temperature than water, you’re effectively pulling the water out of the cider, and leaving the alcohol behind. This is called ‘jacking’ and takes a lot less effort than normal boiling dist

Fhaolan

Fhaolan

Cloudwalking, what's the deal?

Most of my worldbuilding blogs revolve around me filling in details, pointing out things I find interesting, and so forth. This one's a bit different as I don't have an answer for it. It's a question that I would be curious to see the writers answer, but I doubt they'll address it (accidentally or otherwise). We'll start off with what we know: Pegasi can walk on clouds, and manipulate them like they are solid objects. Other pony tribes cannot, and it has been demonstrated that non-pega

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Fhaolan

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

Really, that should have been the episode name.   Chimera Here’s something vaguely interesting. Originally, it looked like MLP:FiM was going to use the Dungeons and Dragons incarnations of monsters. The hydra, for example, is not the classic mythological version of a snake with many heads, but the middle ages Bestiary version that is more a giant lizard with many heads. And Dungeons & Dragons original author and editor, Gary Gygax, used the Bestiary version to build much of the monsters f

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Fhaolan

Starswirl the Bearded

Right, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted to this particular blog so let’s do one that has been simmering in the back of my mind for quite some time.   As before, let’s start with what we know: In the MLP: FiM cartoon, Starswirl the Bearded is mentioned several times.   In Luna Eclipsed, Twilight dresses up as Starswirl in a stereotypical wizards hat and cloak, complete with stars and moons (instead of the more common astronomical glyphs), but with the addition of bells all over the hat. Int

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Fhaolan

Bits and Pieces

Okay, I've got a collection of little bits here, none of which have ended up big enough for an essay of their own. Mostly updates to previous entries.   Also, this one will be the last essay on the 'every week' schedule, as I've covered all the bigger ideas I had and I've fulfilled my need to get most of this junk down somewhere so it's not clogging up my mind, preventing me from concentrating on other projects. I'll still do more entries, but it will be less regular and more when inspiration

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Fhaolan

Governor of Ponyville

I was going to talk about the pony’s categorization and treatment of Monsters, but every time I sat down to write it all out, I came up with half a paragraph of text. I honestly thought I’d be able to do more with that, so I’m going to delay that topic for a bit in hopes of developing more material.     In the meantime, let’s talk about government. Specifically local, or Ponyville, government. In my episode notes I regularly mention Ponyville’s government, so what have we gathered so far:

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Fhaolan

Sophistry

Yay, I managed to get this together today, keeping to my schedule of one worldbuilding essay a week. Yeah, it's a bit light, but .     How the various creatures are portrayed in MLP, and how the ponies react to them, is very odd and seemingly inconsistent. As I’ve mentioned before, inconsistencies are opportunities for worldbuilding.   Those who are reading my various posts may have noticed that I am using an odd word ‘Sophont’, where others would likely use ‘Sapient’ or ‘Sentient’. It’s a

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Fhaolan

Sir Gala-had, always late to the party

Last week we has the Spring and Summer festivals. Now onto the other two seasons.   Fall Festivals   Like the spring festivals, we have two in the fall: Nightmare Night and the Running of the Leaves. The Running of the Leaves feels a lot like the exact opposite of Winter Wrap Up. In this case the ponies are removing the last of Fall to make way for Winter. It’s a time of games and other events, but it doesn’t seem to have the same emotional significance as it's Spring counterpart. It's long

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Fhaolan

It’s not Destiny, it’s Fete!

Festivals and celebrations are very important to most cultures and exactly how they celebrate them can tell you a lot about the people themselves, of course. Most of the festivals we’ve seen in MLP:FiM are expys of real-life Western holidays. But not all of them are, and in some cases there are some subtle differences.   Most festivals in real life are sourced from two different places. The oldest come from the various agricultural-driven needs like planting, harvesting, or natural events like

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Fhaolan

Education in Equestria

I’ve talked about parts of this all over the forum, this is really just assembling it all into one place.   What do we know about the education system of Equestria?   We know that Ponyville has a one-room schoolhouse that appears to only have one class and teacher. No other schools or teachers are referred to within Ponyville. The expectation seems to be that foals will start school before gaining their cutie-mark, but will gain it at some point while in school. Lessons include regular readi

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Fhaolan

Generation of Ideas: What Fresh Pony is This?

Okay, basically I’ve watched all the prior generations of My Little Pony. And my conclusion is this: while there is stuff that can be borrowed from these generations, they need liberal interpretations to be truly salvageable.   If we are to force it all into a consistent history, it’s necessary to do some serious crowbarring. And my personal starting point would be re-order the various series.   In a more reasonable order, we start with My Little Pony Tales. An earth pony settlement in a sou

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Fhaolan

Generation of Ideas: Third times the charm?

Generation 3 had less stuff in it for worldbuilding than even G1.5’s My Little Pony Tales. This is at the same time very easy to summarize, and yet very hard to find anything useful.   The ponies are separated into four different tribes, one of which is more a different race than a tribe. The Earth Ponies live in Ponyville again, this time a village primarily built with late Victorian architecture plus several ‘mock’ buildings that are made to resemble household objects. The village is built a

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Fhaolan

Doctor Whooves

This one’s a bit different. I was originally planning on an article about the education system in Equestria for Monday, but I decided to do an early posting on a different topic. This isn't really 'worldbuilding', but it's my blog post, so I'll break my pattern when I want to.   It’s the 50th Aniversary of Doctor Who, and the start of Season 4 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. @@CITRUS KING46 suggested doing a top 10 Doctor Who episode list to commemorate the occasion, and I honestly th

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Fhaolan

Equuiforming

I’ve noticed several postings over the last couple of months about the world of Ponies. Not the country of Equestria, but the world it’s situated on.   Equestria is a nation occupying most of the landmass of a single continent, according to the official map. There are arrows on that map pointing towards other 'places' which we can infer to be other nations, and probably other continents. These include lands of Gryphons, Dragons, and somewhere out there is Saddle Arabia, and wherever the Zebras

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Fhaolan

Generation of Ideas: My Little Pony Tales

Honestly, this series wasn’t as bad as I remembered it being. While there was an episode or two that insisted on the fillies needing coltfriends, and the colts were almost universally portrayed in negative stereotypes, overall it wasn’t *that* bad. Sweetheart is best G1.5 pony.   Oh yes, as mentioned in my Episode Watching Blog, I’m treating My Little Pony Tales as Generation 1.5. Officially it’s still Generation 1, as the generations are determined by the toy line, not the shows. But this sho

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Fhaolan

My Little Armory (Part 2)

Last week I talked about weapons that are in-show. This week, we do armor, and if I have time I'll dive into speculation about both weapons and armor.   There’s the Canterlot Guard armor, of course, with two variants the golden ‘Day Guard’, and the gray ‘Night Guard’. Shining Armor, as captain of the guard has an identical suit, but primarily purple rather than gold or gray. The guards of the Crystal Empire show up in identical designs, as do Luna’s personal guard (despite their batpony diff

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Fhaolan

My Little Armory (Part 1)

Those that know me will probably be wondering why this essay has taken so long to show up. Mainly this is due to prioritization, enough other people have discussed this topic that I didn’t feel it was that urgent. However, the discussion has reached a point where I am disagreeing just enough with the various conclusions reached that I’ve decided to put this one together.   First, what do we know? There are several references to weaponry in FiM and some of them have interesting features.  

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Fhaolan

The Generation of Ideas: The Use of Friends

Last week, I detailed what I was able to glean from the entire run of My Little Pony 'n Friends. How can we use this information? Well, it's pretty obvious this is not a part of Equestria taken literally. The base rules of the world are different, with a larger variety of sentient creatures, cutie-marks and unicorn magic working differently, and so on.   However, this is the series that inspired Lauren Faust as she developed Friendship is Magic, and several of the things from this series have

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Fhaolan

The Generation of Ideas: My Little Pony 'n Friends

Alright, I've finished watching the first My Little Pony series: My Little Pony 'n Friends from 1985 to 1987. This involved two TV Specials, a Theatrical release, and a 65-episode TV series (four of which were re-edited versions of the TV specials).   Technically my episode-watching blog for this series isn't quite done yet, as the last episodes of the series will be tomorrow, but those episodes are a re-edit of the 'Escape from Catrina' TV Special. Nothing important will be revealed by this e

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Fhaolan

Terror of Tartaurus

Since I recently got my only MLP fanfic so far actually published (Doctor Whooves and the Terror of Tartaurus. It took a lot longer to get it through editing and proofreading than I had planned, but *shrug*.), I think I'll talk about the specific worldbuilding I dealt with in the story. This breaks down into some sub-topics:   Tartaurus   Tartarus is mentioned in 'It's About Time' as being guarded by Cerberus and containing many ancient evils, which is pretty much what Greek Myth tells us as

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Fhaolan

Dues Ex Luna

This title works so much better, as Luna is spelled in the Roman manner already.   As I mentioned previously, Luna has a lot more complications in her status than Celestia, mostly due to her imprisonment in the Moon. She wasn't around to object to any change in the way the populace viewed her. Everything I said about Celestia applies to Luna, but there are some additional things I want to mention.   First, I want to briefly address Luna's strange aging between Season 1 and Season 2. Last tim

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Fhaolan

Dues Ex Caelestis

Just as a note, yes I spelled it very deliberately in the title. It may not be accurate Latin, but it does the job I want it to. I think.   I'm going to be walking a line with this entry, and I'm going to be trying very, very hard not to cross it. It's not against this forum's rules to talk about religion, but it's still a very tricky subject and can easily offend people when that is not my goal. At several points I was severely tempted to use current real-world religions and controversial cur

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Fhaolan

But Why Do This?

I've been trying to publish my essays on a schedule, but I feel like I need to explain why I'm doing these blog entries at all, and so I'm publishing this out-of-order. Several times I've been told "You know this is a cartoon, right? The creators didn't put this much effort into it, why are you bothering?"   Actually, they did. They put a lot of effort into making this cartoon, and I respect the effort that they put into it. I know I don't have the skills to do what they do, and I truly know t

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Fhaolan

The Generation of Ideas: The Begining

Originally I was going to do a couple of entries about how it is possible to pull worldbuilding ideas and information from the previous generations of My Little Pony, when I realized something.   I don't really remember the previous generations well enough to do this.   I remember the first TV movie with the dueling rainbows, but past that point it starts to get vague. If I'm going to tackle this topic competently, I'm going to need to... oh god.   Weep for me, dear readers. For I am going

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Fhaolan

The Elements of Harmony: The Basics Redux

This is new for my blog, but will likely show up again on a regular basis as I get farther along. I'm going to do a brief revisit on something I've already talked about before, as something sparked a bit for me recently.   In a previous entry on the Elements of Harmony: http://mlpforums.com/blog/844/entry-4702-the-elements-of-harmony-the-basics/ I listed the various Elements using the names that Twilight read from a history/mythological book. Those names are what the Mane 6 have continued to u

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Fhaolan

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